Boogeyman 2 starts as 8 year old Laura (Sammi Hanratty) & her 11 year old brother Henry Porter (Jarrod Bailey) witness the brutal killings of both their parents by an unknown 'boogeyman'. Jump forward 10 years later & Henry (Matt Cohen) has been a resident in the Hillridge psychiatric hospital, the day he gets out his sister Laura (Danielle Savre) checks in to try & overcome her phobia about the boogeyman just like her brother Henry has. With the help of Dr. Jessica Ryan (Renee O'Connor) & other's who suffer from a wide range of phobia's Laura hopes to stop having constant nightmares, however a fellow patient Mark (David Gallagher) who is afraid of the dark is found sliced in half. While officially it goes down as an accident Laura believes the boogeyman might have done it & as the bodies pile up it seems like she might be right...
Edited & directed by Jeff Betancourt I went into the rather generic & uninspiring sounding Boogeyman 2 not expecting that much so I was pleasantly surprised to find a mildly effective Scream (1996) type teen slasher with a twist, now I have never seen the original Boogeyman (2005) but by all accounts it's terrible & this sequel has no connection to it other than in title alone. Anyway, the script here by Brian Sieve takes itself very seriously & feels like a cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) & Bad Dreams (1988) with it's mental hospital setting, it's string of set-piece gory murders & the basic story of some supernatural boogeyman stalking the patients used by someone else as cover for other motives. The film finished with several twists & turns not all of which make perfect logical sense but they work well enough & quite liked them. Teen slashers aren't know for their deep character's but that's one of Boogeyman 2's strength's, while they aren't exactly likable & you won't mind or care when they get killed off the character's here have a little bit more to them than one might expect. With the fact that they all have individual fears that affect them them in different ways it gives them a little bit more personality & help them stand out a bit more than than the usual annoying teenager who populate slasher films. At about 90 odd minutes it moves along at a decent pace, there's a steady stream of gory & quite inventive murders & is certainly one of the better low budget slasher films I've seen made this millennium.
Director Betancourt does a decent job here, while it's nowhere near as bad as The Blair Witch Project (1999) he always keeps his camera moving, even when it's just shot's of people talking the camera sways from side to side. The whole film reminds me of an episode of Dawson's Creek (1998 - 2003) with very autumnal colours & that shaky hand-held type cinematography although I'm not sure if the comparison is a compliment or not! There are some pleasingly gory & over-the-top murder scenes too, a guy is literally gutted as his intestines splat on the floor, there are knives in throats, someone is cut in half & hung up, someone is filled with fat which makes their skin expand & eventually explode, there's a cool bit when someone has their chest forced open & their heart is pulled out, there's a bit which made me queasy (not easy to do these days) where a girl has maggots crawling all over her arm & burrowing into cuts before she grabs a scalpel & slices her arms open to get them out & a really cool decapitation via garden shears (chrome plated no less!) which surely was inspired by the classic slasher The Burning (1981). All the usual horror tricks & clichés are used, lights not working, people jumping out of shadow's & a final fifteen minutes as the killer stalks the one remaining survivor through dark corridors.
Technically the film is very good, it's much better than most straight-to-DVD horror. A lot like Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007) in fact only not as good. This is probably one of the few recent horror flicks not to have any noticeable CGI computer effects, it's good old fashioned fake blood & proper make-up effects all the way. The acting is alright & probably better than the average straight-to-DVD film, Tobin Bell is better know as Jigsaw from the Saw franchise while Renee O'Connor is perhaps better known as Gabrielle from over 130 episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess (1995 - 2001).
Boogeyman 2 turned out much, much better than I had expected. OK sure it isn't any sort of masterpiece but for what it is I liked it & thought it worked surprisingly well. Worth a watch especially if you like horror films. Not to be confused with either of the Ulli Lommel films The Boogeyman (1980) or it's sequels Boogeyman II (1983) & Return of the Boogeyman (1994).
Edited & directed by Jeff Betancourt I went into the rather generic & uninspiring sounding Boogeyman 2 not expecting that much so I was pleasantly surprised to find a mildly effective Scream (1996) type teen slasher with a twist, now I have never seen the original Boogeyman (2005) but by all accounts it's terrible & this sequel has no connection to it other than in title alone. Anyway, the script here by Brian Sieve takes itself very seriously & feels like a cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) & Bad Dreams (1988) with it's mental hospital setting, it's string of set-piece gory murders & the basic story of some supernatural boogeyman stalking the patients used by someone else as cover for other motives. The film finished with several twists & turns not all of which make perfect logical sense but they work well enough & quite liked them. Teen slashers aren't know for their deep character's but that's one of Boogeyman 2's strength's, while they aren't exactly likable & you won't mind or care when they get killed off the character's here have a little bit more to them than one might expect. With the fact that they all have individual fears that affect them them in different ways it gives them a little bit more personality & help them stand out a bit more than than the usual annoying teenager who populate slasher films. At about 90 odd minutes it moves along at a decent pace, there's a steady stream of gory & quite inventive murders & is certainly one of the better low budget slasher films I've seen made this millennium.
Director Betancourt does a decent job here, while it's nowhere near as bad as The Blair Witch Project (1999) he always keeps his camera moving, even when it's just shot's of people talking the camera sways from side to side. The whole film reminds me of an episode of Dawson's Creek (1998 - 2003) with very autumnal colours & that shaky hand-held type cinematography although I'm not sure if the comparison is a compliment or not! There are some pleasingly gory & over-the-top murder scenes too, a guy is literally gutted as his intestines splat on the floor, there are knives in throats, someone is cut in half & hung up, someone is filled with fat which makes their skin expand & eventually explode, there's a cool bit when someone has their chest forced open & their heart is pulled out, there's a bit which made me queasy (not easy to do these days) where a girl has maggots crawling all over her arm & burrowing into cuts before she grabs a scalpel & slices her arms open to get them out & a really cool decapitation via garden shears (chrome plated no less!) which surely was inspired by the classic slasher The Burning (1981). All the usual horror tricks & clichés are used, lights not working, people jumping out of shadow's & a final fifteen minutes as the killer stalks the one remaining survivor through dark corridors.
Technically the film is very good, it's much better than most straight-to-DVD horror. A lot like Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007) in fact only not as good. This is probably one of the few recent horror flicks not to have any noticeable CGI computer effects, it's good old fashioned fake blood & proper make-up effects all the way. The acting is alright & probably better than the average straight-to-DVD film, Tobin Bell is better know as Jigsaw from the Saw franchise while Renee O'Connor is perhaps better known as Gabrielle from over 130 episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess (1995 - 2001).
Boogeyman 2 turned out much, much better than I had expected. OK sure it isn't any sort of masterpiece but for what it is I liked it & thought it worked surprisingly well. Worth a watch especially if you like horror films. Not to be confused with either of the Ulli Lommel films The Boogeyman (1980) or it's sequels Boogeyman II (1983) & Return of the Boogeyman (1994).